By Any Other Name
by MissAnnThropic
Summary: She and Alec were growing to trust one another, first as soldiers in a war zone, then, after a fashion, as something nearly like friends. Sequel to 'The Cat Came Back'
1. Chapter 1

Title: By Any Other Name

Author: MissAnnThropic

Spoilers: Third in series. 1. Genetically Engineered Stray; 2. The Cat Came Back.

LiveJournal: miss_annthropic(dot)livejournal(dot)com

Summary: She and Alec were growing to trust one another, first as soldiers in a war zone, then, after a fashion, as something nearly like friends.

Disclaimer: None of it's mine. I'm just a sad little fangirl that spends her days writing fanfic and watching DVDs of her favorite shows :(

Author's Note: This has become something of a little AU-verse of my own where Alec and Max share a bed for peace of mind. And here I finally got to address the fact that, after season one, the tryptophan just disappeared and I never figured how or why.

* * *

Max's world outside of Manticore began to resemble the life she'd left behind when she got recaptured. She shook a lot of the lingering reminders of Manticore and embraced herself again. Max.

This time, her world had a few changes that became decidedly permanent.

Alec started slipping into her bedroom at night on a regular basis. She came to expect it. They never talked about it during the day, even after Alec had joined the team at Jam Pony and she saw him on a fairly constant basis. They still bickered and fought like cats and, well, cats, but at night it was different.

Alec had hit the nail on the head when he told her that she didn't like sleeping surrounded by civilians any more than he did. It was true. The comfort of a fellow soldier, of backup, was priceless.

So no matter how mad they got at each other during the day, when the sun went down and sleep beckoned, Alec found his way into her apartment and then her bed.

Cindy knew about the sleeping arrangement (she caught Alec coming out of the bathroom one morning when she was up at a strangely early hour thanks to Dreamy), but so far she hadn't said anything. She was waiting for Max to spill her guts. Every morning Cindy pinned Max with a searing look, waiting for the explanation that was due.

Max never explained the situation to her roommate. She could never make Cindy understand the comfort and security that she took from Alec being in her bed. Cindy couldn't fathom sleeping with someone without _sleeping_ with someone.

Because she and Alec did not have sex. They barely touched. It was only to find peace and rest in a world that would keep them constantly on guard.

And Alec had been right about getting five hours of sleep. Max stopped having episodes of the shakes entirely. She never saw Alec succumb to them after that first sleep-deprived bout.

Sometimes, when she and Alec weren't in the middle of a daytime fight, they would talk. Alec was different when it was just her and him in her bedroom in the middle of the night. Slowly, she saw a calmer, more analytical side of him that flew in the face of the cocky, arrogant persona he paraded to the outside world.

Max thought it was because she was Manticore, just like him, so he felt no need to pretend to be someone other than a born and raised weapon with her. In the night hours, they found themselves comfortable with one another, more than they ever were in the daytime when they were also putting on their shows for the ordinary humans all around them.

Max understood what was happening, at least from a combat-zone perspective. Using each other as a psychological comfort blanket at night was working on their subconscious minds. She and Alec were growing to trust one another, first as soldiers in a war zone (because the world outside Manticore _was_ a war zone to a transgenic), then, after a fashion, as something nearly like friends.

Max still gave him hell during the day, around their mutual friends, but she didn't despise him nearly as much as the world must think she did.

Cindy didn't like it much. Assuming Max was 'on the sly' with Hot Boy, she saw Max's bedroom behavior as somehow disloyal to Logan. Because Max had made no clean break with Logan, despite the virus.

Cindy just didn't understand. She knew Max, but not like Alec knew her. Alec knew Max and X5-452. She wasn't whole without both. Max felt fairly certain no one knew Alec like she did, because she knew X5-494, too.

* * *

"What was your name?"

Alec was sprawled on her bed, lying on his stomach, shirt abandoned on the floor, his lean arms spread wide. Max was curled against the headboard, her legs crooked and bridging over the small of Alec's back. She was staring languidly at him as he dozed. She could feel his body heat on the back of her naked calves.

"What?" he mumbled.

Max moved her leg to brush her ankle against his side. She'd stopped fighting their latest expression of Manticore's gene splicing experiment. The cat DNA in them made them nocturnal by nature, but it also made them tactile. Max had seen it with cats in the streets. When they weren't fighting, they were rubbing up against each other all the time. Max felt the urge to do it, too, with people she came to trust.

An urge she resisted.

Max had fought that all her life, ever since she lost her unit mates and the only people who had been truly, completely close to her. She never let herself trust another person enough to be touchy. But she had grown that comfortable with Alec, and he with her.

He had the same cat genes as she did. When his defenses were torn away, he wanted absent contact just as much as she did. They were able to give each other that, too, without making a big deal about it.

"What was your name?" Max repeated.

Alec opened his eyes, turned his face toward her, and frowned. "Why are you asking? You were the one who named me in the first place, remember?"

Max smirked. "You said once…" she bit her lip. "You said your unit wasn't that different from mine when you were growing up."

Alec's body tensed, though he didn't move in response. He just stared at her, his eyes suddenly clear of any signs of sleep. He was fully alert, despite his deceptively lazy sprawl on her mattress.

"What did your brothers and sisters call you?" she whispered. She'd never gone so far as to call the others in his unit his 'brothers and sisters'. She took a chance in doing so. In fact, the question was a landmine in itself, but Max just wanted to know. She'd wondered about it for a long time, but before she never felt it was the right time to ask.

Alec shifted on the bed uneasily. She thought maybe he would leave just to avoid answering the question. Their childhoods at Manticore were touchy subjects. They were so very rarely happy memories.

Then he whispered, so lowly Max almost had to strain to hear it, "Daniel."

Max studied him and tried to think of him as anything other than Alec or X5-494. The two names she knew him by said nothing of the covers he'd used on missions for Manticore.

How many identities did they all have? How were they ever supposed to know who they really were?

She tried to think of Alec when he'd been Daniel, a boy with Ben's face in the barracks down the hall from her own.

She'd held tenaciously to the name her brothers and sisters gave her. Even after she escaped, she kept the name. It was a gift from the only family she ever really had. She made it her name through sheer force of will.

"Do you want me to call you that?"

He became even tenser, his muscles locked. "No."

Max cocked her head in question.

Alec got up off the bed and moved to the window. Max, alert to his discomfort, sat up and watched him.

Alec was quiet a long time, his back straight and shoulders tense. Max didn't push. She waited.

Finally, Alec turned to her. His face was in shadows but Max's eyes were good at gulping scant light from dark environments. His expression was grim, his features drawn and tight.

Alec sighed. "The trainers had no idea we'd given each other names, beyond our designations," he said softly. "When my unit was in the woods taking a survival course, Becky…" Alec stopped and paused. "Becky got hurt. She fell down a ravine and broke her back." He moved to the dresser and picked at the peeling paint. "She and Jenny were close. Jenny started screaming down at her, trying to find out if she was alive. She used her name instead of her designation."

Max frowned but would not interrupt.

Alec scratched at the back of his head. "The trainers heard her. After what happened with your unit, they were paranoid we were on the road to revolt, too. Like it was today names, tomorrow busting out of Manticore.

"We were all taken back to the complex and… interrogated. They didn't let up on us until we confessed our 'names'. Then we had to endure conditioning to purge the identity."

Max remembered being tortured by Manticore until she stopped referring to herself as 'Max' and instead as 'X5-452.' She tried to imagine it being done to children. To young Alec.

"How old were you?" she asked lowly.

Alec shrugged. "Fourteen."

All for the sin of wanting a name.

Alec moved back to the bed and sat down on the edge across from her. "They split up our unit after that, started training us for individual covert missions. They thought it was too dangerous for us to be together anymore." Alec cast a watery smile in her direction, "I don't want you to call me that. Honestly, I hear that name and I still have a knee-jerk reaction to it. It makes me remember all the… conditioning."

Max sidled closer but didn't touch him. "I picked my own name, a lot of the kids in my unit picked their own," she said. "Did you pick Daniel?"

Alec flinched but shook his head. "Jenny overheard the name listening to some of our instructors talk. She thought it would be a good name for me."

Alec had never had a name that he had chosen. That made Max sad, because sometimes it seemed her name was the only thing that was really, truly hers.

"What would you pick for a name now?"

Alec gave it some thought and looked at her. He looked puzzled. "I don't know… why, you thinking it's time for a new one?"

"No… just curious what you would want."

He shrugged. "I've gotten used to Alec."

She thought maybe he just had no idea what he wanted. He'd been living on the drive of others for so long, even Max's insistence that he go by something other than X5-494. When he was christened 'Alec' as almost a joke.

"Well, I'm glad you went along with Alec," she said, "because I can't really imagine calling you 'dick' when it's NOT as an insult."

"Would take the power out of it as far as name-calling goes, wouldn't it?" he countered with a faint smile.

There was an awkward silence then that they mutually decided to end by calling it a night. Anything more and it would become too intimate. They were adept at knowing just when to retreat and surrender. Alec turned off the lights and the two crawled into bed.

Max was almost asleep with Alec curled against her, back to back, when something occurred to her. She didn't give Alec enough credit or due, and knowing better how he had come to be the Alec she knew, she needed him to understand that _she_ understood. It was likely no one else ever would.

"Alec?" she whispered.

"Mmmm?"

Max took a breath, almost hesitant to actually admit the words dancing on the tip of her tongue. "I wish I'd had you the first time I busted out of Manticore."

She could only imagine how less lonely it would have been to have someone like her at her side, sleeping at her back.

She couldn't see him smile, but she could almost feel it. If it had been Max and Alec, as they were in the light of day, he would have made her pay dearly for that confession. But they were different in the night. "Well, if this is all I'll ever know of home, that's okay with me."

And it might be, for both of them, and that was sad. Sad, but like him, she could live with it.

A fellow soldier, a trusted comrade, at her back in the dark of night. She could definitely deal.

END


	2. Chapter 2

Hello, fellow Dark Angel fans,

I have written another installment of my Dark Angel Stray Series called "At It Like Alley Cats" that I have posted on my livejournal. I will not be posting it on fanfiction net for reasons you can probably guess from the title of the installment. It has some mature content in it, and I know ff net does not like for authors to post that kind of stuff on their website, and I will respect that. So if you're interested in reading the continuation of this Series, head on over to my LJ, the address is listed on the header of my fics and on my profile, just replace the (dot) with an actual dot.

At the beginning of writing the Stray Series, I never intended for it to go the route of Max/Alec. I am a fan of the pairing, I just didn't think this particular series would go there. Then, as tends to happen, my Muse had to point out something. If Alec is sneaking into Max's bedroom at night, eventually he's going to do so when she's in heat.

What can I do? The Muse usually has a point when she brings up logistics like this.

Go read and enjoy!

MissAnnThropic


End file.
